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Bravo to the Lete family. Jason is blessed to have proactive parents who can get him this life-saving vaccine. It is just sad that they had to go out of the U.S. to get it, even sadder that most parents don’t have the means to do this.

I lost my only child, Ryan, to group C meningococcal disease. When Ryan died, we had no access to or knowledge of the vaccine that was on the U.S. market. I watched my son go from perfect health to blood coming from every orifice of his body and death in less than 14 hours. That was 15 years ago.

With the outbreaks of group B meningococcal disease on two college campuses leaving debilitation of several college students, the CDC had to bring in an approved vaccine from another country not yet approved in this country to stop it.

While the CDC does an excellent job in outbreak and disease prevention, we must encourage them to go even further to prevent what is preventable and recommend life-saving vaccines when available.

As a mother who buried her only child needlessly and the director of a national organization that has seen and continues to see debilitation and death by this preventable disease, I am sickened that we consider a vaccine that could stop such a deadly disease not cost effective.

Any disease outbreak is a plane ride away or can arrive via a simple crossing of a border.

It is time we get our priorities in order and put all public health at the top of that list. For more information, contact meningitis-angels.org.

Actually spacey the only spending item that the income tax is able to pay for is the interest on our National Debt.

Sort of like if we had a credit card and we made just enough income to cover the minimum monthly payment and no more. Then they raise our credit limit, I mean the 'debt ceiling'.

That might not seem like enough, but this is where things get tricky. The money our government spends comes from more borrowing, but also from more printing of money. Sort of like counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is one service that is not offered with a credit card. However this is inflationary and leads to higher prices in housing, health care, energy, food and education. The government then releases deceptively low CPI numbers only covers a small fraction of the true amount of price inflation that we are seeing in the economy. Those price increases, the real ones, not the deceptive ones, are all 'taxes' that everybody pays whether you are poor or rich. These taxes hurt the poor the most.

While only about 30% or so of the money our government spends goes to our overseas empire, the spending that we see going toward all of the federal regulatory agencies that prop up large corporations and of course the direct corporate subsidies I believe should be included as this is all money going to prop up the elite corporate industrial complex. This I do believe is the bulk of government spending and should all be abolished immediately. After the giant sucking noise subsides, we would see spending on social services decline naturally as the working class would see a huge injection of wealth and there would be less poor people needing assistance.